On Monday, June 25th, Ben Grohe, Ben Burton and myself, representing product management, engineering and design at TheLadders, respectively, spoke at a local meet-up of the Agile Experience Design group here in New York City, hosted by Pivotal Labs. It was an exciting event, with about 100 people coming out to represent the NYC tech scene.

We were invited to speak about how our teams collaborate, and what processes and tactics we use to conceive, design, build, release, and measure products for our customers. In order to discuss this, we had to first take a step back and address the unique organizational structure and processes here at TheLadders.

TheLadders’ adaptive, agile structure embraces distributed leadership. The entire organization has a shared understanding of the corporate vision and strategy as well as key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success. Decision making is placed with autonomous teams responsible for delivering on those KPIs.

Over the last decade, TheLadders has been able to not only survive, but thrive, in the hyper-competitive online job-matching space, specifically because we believe in collaborative teams, rather than heroic and authoritarian management. This structure is the key to unlocking the potential of a creative organization, capable of rapidly adapting to market conditions and pivoting quickly to exploit new opportunities.

We were very excited to share our processes and philosophy, and to take in the great insights we got from the other attendees. We’re looking forward to finding more opportunities to share our experiences with the NYC technology community.

Will Evans is Manager, Experience Design for TheLadders in New York City with 15 years industry experience in interaction design, information architecture, and user experience strategy.